Strategy 3: Steer customers away from email to automate 5% more requests

For most ecommerce support teams, email represents at least 60% of all requests. If you can drive the most repetitive and basic questions to automated alternatives, your team will save hours per week.

This may seem radical, but we recommend removing your support email from your website. 

3 ways to drive support volume away from email

Link to your Help Center instead

Wherever you currently link your support email — like your website footer or marketing emails — link to your Help Center instead. While email might seem like the preferred method of communication for customers, you might be surprised by how eager they are for a more self-service option. 

88% of customers expect brands to have some sort of self-service portal, thanks to its speed and convenience. A searchable library of help content (ideally with automation to track and manage orders) is much faster than typing a message and waiting for a response. 

Automatically replace links to your email with links to your Contact Form

If a Help Center doesn’t resolve a customer’s query, a Contact Form is a great safety net. Contact Forms guide customers to structure their requests with dropdowns and prompts, which you can use this structure to automatically assign and tag incoming tickets in your helpdesk. 

Here’s an example of a great Contact Form from Ekster, which is accessible from their Help Center:

Contact Forms are easier to automate than email because of the subject line. You can easily set up Rules based on your Contact Form's subjects to automatically organize and prioritize messages from your Contact Form.

Plus, even if the request isn't fully automated, the additional context you’ll get from the form submission will help you resolve the query in one touch. Especially compared to a one-line email that just says, “My thing is broken.”

You can easily replace links to your email with links to your contact form in just a few clicks, right inside Gorgias. Gorgias will scan your website to find all the existing email links, and redirect them to your Contact Form, providing a more streamlined experience for customers and agents alike.

Simply head to Settings > Contact Form and scroll to Replace email links to replace your links. Refer to our Help Doc if you need further assistance.

Want to set up a Contact Form? With Gorgias, you can set up a standalone Contact Form or embed one in your Help Center. 

Enable Chat

When customers are on your website with a question, Chat is a more direct path to an answer than email. You can enrich your Chat with automated answers, order management portals, and more — check out the first section of this article for tips. 

Remember: On Gorgias, live chat is completely optional. You can activate Chat to provide automated support without turning on live chat. You can also set live chat to only be active during certain hours, or after the customer tries automation first. 

Use Autoresponders to handle common questions that still make it to your email inbox

If customers bypass your self-service options and send an email with a basic question — like “Where is my order?” or “Can I return this?” — you have one last line of defense before agents have to step in: Autoresponders. 

Autoresponders use AI to scan incoming email tickets and handle requests without any agent involvement. Unlike Rules, which you can configure to automatically respond to messages, Autoresponders are managed by Gorgias and have a 1-click setup. Also, Autoresponders are nicely designed, with prominent CTAs rather than plain text. 

There are currently three active Autoresponders, with more on the way:

• Auto-close spam emails: When you get a spam email or an email that doesn’t require a response, automatically close it.‍
• Send tracking information email : When customers ask where an order is, automatically send an order tracking link.‍
• Send article recommendation email: When customers ask a question via chat or email that’s answered in your Help Center, automatically send the relevant article.

“The auto-close of spam tickets is awesome. We had so much spam and now it dropped off.”

— Addison Debter, Head of Customer Service at Kirby Allison

You can see all three Autoresponders in action in this video:

Want to get started with Autoresponders? Learn how to set them up with this getting-started guide.